I can’t believe in the sword fights I see. Are these just cinematic conventions? I would think they don’t reflect real world results.
They seem to be dancing and not fighting. It’s not credible that they lock swords and stare at each other. In The Seven Samurai the convention is to whack a guy across the body and they just die.
Anyone actually know anything about sword fights?
I fenced when I was younger. Our coach liked to give a short history of swordfighting at the start of his intro classes. It went: “This is a sword. For the first 5000 years of humanity, it was an improvement over a club in that it was sharp, but it was used basically the same. Then some rich tossers invented fencing as a way to give each other scars to show off. And now it’s the gentlemanly sport you dumb bastards are going to pay me to teach you”. The man had a way with words.
The reality of a lot of real swordfighting is that whacking your metal blade against another metal blade is a good way to get the blade broken or dinged beyond repair. So a lot of “swordfighting” was “try to hit the other guy while avoiding being hit”. I wouldn’t call it dancing - obviously the movies are trying to be more interesting than “Dodge, Dodge, Stab, Fight done in 3 seconds”.
That’s if two opponents with swords met. I imagine most of the time someone with a sword was trying to kill someone without a sword the other poor bastard was practically unarmed. (or they had a pike if they were lucky).
I spent about eight years learning to fight with bokken, which are basically wooden katana. The armor you see them wearing in samurai movies was mostly to stop arrows, not the heavy war swords, particularly since the main style of fighting would be to strike at whatever parts of your opponent’s body aren’t armored, or aren’t armored well enough to stop the weapon: fingers, primarily, or the back of the knee, up under the arm, etc.
It would be fast and bloody, even in full armor.
Between battles, when they were just wearing silk pajamas, they would carry the lighter swords, since hey, no armor. The same targets would apply, because if your opponent can’t stand/hold a sword/be bilaterally symmetric, he’s not going to be much good in a fight. If you run somebody through, you have to wait for him to bleed to death, and in the meantime, he still gets to swing his sword for a few seconds, you’re in range, and you’re wearing pajamas, too.
One thing to note is that (as I understand it) sword fighting was never a thing, outside of dueling. In wars, the principal weapons were spear and bow (regardless of whether we’re talking about Japan or Europe). In the case of Europe, as heavy armor came into being, clubs and warhammers gained some popularity, but outside of that, it mostly comes down on spear and bow.
The sword existed in much the same capacity as a handgun. It’s something that one can carry in town, on your hip, that you can use to assert your position and keep the peace against unarmed peasantry.
In a pinch, if you lost your spear in battle, you would pull and use your sword. But you’d much rather keep your spear as it has greater reach and is much easier to use in formation. You can’t keep guys in formation very well if they need to hack about with a sword, and spreading your guys out is a good way to have them be taken out one by one by a formation of guys with spears.
So just like a sword is a stand-in for a handgun, a spear is a stand-in for a rifle. Hollywood and stage prefer handguns and swords, but in actual fighting, that’s not what’s used except as a fallback weapon.
From what I have experienced in Kendo and Fencing, if you’re in a fight with just swords (which would largely be the case in Japan), then the winner is whoever can best predict what the other guy was going to do. It’s like playing paper-rock-scissors. If you can correctly anticipate how the other guy is going to come at you, you can intercept and then chop through him. An actual fight would probably take less than 2 seconds. And a highly skilled fighter might chop through a whole load of other guys, simply because he’s really good at that sort of anticipation. Speed and dexterity probably had less to do with anything.
If you add a shield in, then - as I’ve heard others describe - things can get a bit more wrestling-like. The sword is a pricey item and if you break it, you’re boned. At least with a spear, if the head comes off, you’ve still got a functional quarterstaff. But if you break your sword, you’re out of luck. Similarly, if you get the sword lodged in the shield or the guy knocks the sword out of your hand, because you only have a single hand gripping it, you’re out of luck. So you end up at a mild stand-off where you don’t want to commit your weapon, and the only solution is to try and force an opening. Thus you end up with a lot of brute force ramming into one another, feints, and other play to get their shield out of the way.
I’d venture to guess that fights like these could either look like stand-offs or moshing depending on the participants and their style.
If this is true then why was there a sword culture?:
Norse swords being precious tools. Samurai swords being the height of human endeavor and craft 400 years ago? The time and effort and expense? How could you spend a years salary on a weapon that might break immediately? If a sword can’t stand the impact of another sword, what the hell is it good for?
Were samurai not principally swordsmen then? Is this from literature or movies?
I’d like to see a movie that addressed the real physical truth of battle
A nobleman or samurai spent very little of his life in war. Most of the time they lived in town, acting as the lawkeepers and managers of the peasants. The right to carry around an implement of death, in town, is a pretty big thing. It’s a large icon of respect both in the fact that you are allowed to have it and in that you have the resources to afford it.
Mostly, they didn’t break, since mostly you didn’t use them against armor or against other swords. But some did. And probably most of the people whose sword never came out in combat at all or whose sword didn’t break, just thought that the guy who had gotten his sword broken was an idiot who had been using the thing wrong. (At a guess.)
Most of the stories of samurai are not from war, they’re about ronin or (for example) the assassinations that took place during the Meiji Restoration. If you look the movie Ran, for example, which is about samurai war, you will see that most of the weapons are spears (yari) or guns (which had replaced bows):
Though, that’s just happenstance that Kurosawa was more historically accurate in this case.
A knight or a samurai is someone who would be specially trained in the sword, whereas a peasant fighter would probably only learn the spear. But the samurai would also know how to fight with the spear, and it’s the one he would prefer in battle.
I suggest looking up scholagladiatoria on YouTube for more information about historic sword use (though it leans towards Europe rather than Japan).
IIRC the bow was the decisive weapon of very few (but very effective and famous) armies, such as the mounted archers of 12th century &ff Mongols, and the English longbowmen of the same era.
The ancient Greek infantry and cavalry relied mostly on hand-to-hand combat with spears and swords. The Macedonians added pikes perhaps twice as long as the earlier conventional spear. The Roman infantry employed 1-2 light javelins which they would throw before closing in with their decisive weapon, a short sword IIRC less than 2 feet long. The greatest European armies of the Middle Ages may have belonged to the Swiss, who were famous for their use of the ~20-foot pike. I do not think any of the foregoing made significant use of archers.
In fencing, the emphasis is on the offensive; the only penalty for losing a round is a point, but you then get another chance.
In a real swordfight you would think it would be defense first, precisely because the stakes are so high (lose a round lose your life). In fiction from Amber to The Princess Bride, there is a lot of narration about various arcane moves and techniques, such as Corwin leaving small openings for his opponent so as to score on a counterthrust, or Westley talking openly about this or that stratagem. Seems more akin to chess than a desperate fight to the death.
I’d guess Rob Roy’s final fight is more typical, though his foe deliberately prolonged the fight (paying the price for his arrogance when Liam Neeson grabbed his sword and eviscerated him).
You should check out Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, particularly the Water Book where he writes on swordsmanship techniques;
When the enemy attacks and you also attack with the long sword, you should go in with a sticky feeling and fix your long sword against the enemy’s as you receive his cut. The spirit of stickiness is not hitting very strongly, but hitting so that the long swords do not separate easily. It is best to approach as calmly as possible when hitting the enemy’s long sword with stickiness. The difference between “Stickiness” and “Entanglement” is that stickiness is firm and entanglement is weak. You must appreciate this.
I kind of figured there would be a zen explanation of it all, but it leaves me just as confused as ever.
Swords “fixing” means? Edge to edge? Do they become pocked? Are they still useful? When do the blades break?
The most effective fighter must be the faster no? Any of these cinematic moves could be interrupted by the other party doing a shock and awe, which would be the whole point. So when two people try to shock and awe each other, it cannot look like these choreographed fights in films.
If you can be the slower swordsman and be better, what would that look like? The other guy is moving faster than you.
Theatrical sword fighting is an art form in itself. However, it makes swords look rather inefficient as a weapon.
Watch the duel between Darth Vader & Luke Skywalker when they first meet in The Empire Strikes Back. Vader’s just holding his sword in one hand, casually parrying anything Luke throws at him, while Luke is fighting like he’s on PCP. Vader eventually gets tired of this shit and cuts loose on him, and it takes everything Luke’s got to stay on his feet.
Katanas aren’t really meant to be clashed edge-to-edge. You can use the flat or dull edge to deflect or trap but that’s already advanced fighting. In Japanese sword fighting, it’s basically ducking or edging away from his cut and putting in your own killing stroke. There is no western “right of way.” Often both of you get wounded mortally.
Also, katanas are differentially tempered (actually hardened) so the edge is keen and much harder that the rest of the blade. An edge-to-edge clash is sure to damage it.
Many like to dismiss reenactors like the SCA but one thing we learn in a hurry, most sword fights without shields are over in a few seconds. Shields can drag that out to a few minutes. The stuff you see in some movies IS more like dancing. They are trying to make blade contact because it looks cool. People trying to hit each other looks much different. Battlefield survival was all about teamwork and situational awareness. once something poked or slashed you, you’re out of the fight.
some examples
The Samurai are a surprisingly recent group in history, but over that time a variety of standards in armament existed. The sword was actually a major weapon, but only in a very specific role. It was a cavalry saber, whose primary use was attacking unarmored targets from horseback. In that role it was quite effective. However, samurai preferred the spear and the bow for fighting on the battlefield against organized forces. Swords were a backup weapon, except among specialized assault troops which used an oversized weapon. Intending no offense to the kendo students among the 'dope, but if you were in the position of having to use kendo skills in an actual fight, you were about to have a very bad day. The first guy with a spear who came up would likely run you through long before you got to strike at the small gaps in his armor.
This is also a pattern among many, but not all, militaries around the world. Spears are cheap and usable in a lot of different ways, and bows are always useful if you can fire off enough volleys. However, swords were considered extremely useful for warriors and soldiers through a lot of history. Many armies didn’t have large stocks of quality armor which might have made swords less useful. In addition, before a few hundred years ago, many forms of armor would have been resistant, but not invulnerable, to chopping weapons. This is one reason most European swords were straight: even high-quality scale and mail-type armors could be hacked apart. Even if the armor didn’t break, you stood a good chance of breaking bones, which was as good as a killing blow. Better, even - prisoners could be ransomed.
That said, talking about the kinds of weaponry in use around the world is a huge topic to cover. Suffice it to say that a real sword-fight would probably not look terribly intersting by Hollywood standards. A sane fighter wouldn’t use flashy techniques. Most fights were won by the use of cautious defense and basic skills honed to a fine art. That’s true whether you were talking about Roman-era gladiators, medieval knights fighting for honor, or samurai testing their skills in a friendly contest.
In movies they’re always twirling the swords over their heads. Abe Lincoln did the same move with his ax in that vampire movie. Did anyone in the history of the world ever actually do this in a real fight?
So I guess in Seven Samurai killing someone at will basically by striking once on their back, is really a cinematic shorthand and poetic license.
It’s funny there are more dramatic options with guns which are supposed to be more final.
But filmmakers take a lot of liberties with that reality too.
Not entirely true. Several militaries used swords as a soldier’s weapons. The Romans for example: They had a spear, but it was primarily to mess up the opponent’s shield. In close quarters fighting they Would stab a short sword between their shield and the shield of the soldier next to them.
There were also multiple examples of infantry units using swords during the rennaissance (the age of pike blocks) - mostly as irregular troops who could maneuver under the unwieldy pikes and hack away at the pikemen.
That being said, the sword was primarily a weapon of a Warrior, not the Solder. Many infantry encounters in warfare would be fight with swords but those were battles between Warrior groups, not Soldiers fighting Soldiers.
It looks impressive, and if you are tall it can be rather intimidating to less experienced swordspersons. But it isn’t exactly a practical move.
Hollywood takes a lot of liberties with wounds by weaponry. They particularly love having arrows be an instant kill. Fact is, unless an arrow goes through your skull or directly into your heart you will die from blood loss from an arrow hit, and that takes time.
Playwrights of old actually often had a better sense of the effects of wounds than Hollywood. That is why so many people are able to give death speeches after a rapier hit in Shakespeare’s works.